As I sat down on the sofa in the living room wearing nothing but a pair of jeans from yesterday mom came into the room from her bedroom.
“What are you doing wearing old clothes? Go put something on before you settle down, I’ll make you some breakfast.” She said as she grabbed an apron from the kitchen rack and put it on, tying her dressing gown belt around the apron at the front instead of tying the apron at the back.
With a sigh I got up from the sofa and went into my room to change into today’s clothes. I thought I could laze around on my day off but apparently there were limits. I pulled on a thick gray t-shirt and then switched my jeans for a new pair that had orange knee patches for some reason. They were bought like that.
Most of the clothes needed belts or straps pulled to fit my smaller body, there weren’t many actual kids clothes in poor districts once you got out of baby sized clothes. Generally you just bought small adults clothes and pinned, sewed or belted them smaller.
I walked out to the living room once more to find mom microwaving a pancake roll she’d gotten from somewhere. She didn’t go out often but she still got out a little these days, at least for now. She was reaching the normal amount of time she’d be okay, sometimes she held out a lot longer but it was usually a few weeks for good and then a few for bad. It wasn’t a hard limit or anything, just a rough up and down spiral pattern that seemed to repeat endlessly. I just tried to be there when she was awake, maybe grab a new incarna for her to use for a while if she wasn’t hating the thing and if she was in a super hating mood I’d just lay next to her in her bed and soothe her until she accepted the incarna connection and drifted off for a while.
It wasn’t just mental, there were major brain scars from the same over stimulation repeating at dangerous peaks and troughs again and again until nothing felt real or good or bad anymore. Real life wouldn’t have enough impact to feel like it was actually happening. If she’d got help early then it would be alright, but it was years too late for that. She’d need major and specific spacer grade surgery to rebuild the damaged parts.
Sanctum could likely do something for her if it was in her, but the brain damage made her automatically fail the compatibility test. According to Sanctum, ignoring that measurement would be like trying to breathe in a room with no air, you could handle running through but you couldn’t stick around. You certainly couldn’t do surgery. Just a nanite swarm rule thing. I’d asked during one of the quiet moments in the past.
One of my longer term goals was to get mom into orbit and get her the surgery she’d need. No doubt she’d refuse the expense and risk the whole way. I’d really have to bundle her up there when it came down to it, it would be a long way off though. Getting off world wasn’t cheap, even getting to the iron ring would cost more than a hundred thousand aura just for tickets at the local spaceport.
The iron ring was a mostly abandoned orbital ring project, it was meant to be a big thing that would let people live and work in orbit all around the globe but it ended up being about nine foot of coiled iron cable in width set up around the equator at around four hundred kilometers up.
Plans to build off the cable were talked about for years when I was a toddler, still saw repeats of old footage of different corps announcing plans to build on it from time to time. At the moment there was just some advertising rigs bolted onto it and that was about it. Something about the conglomerate that owned the ring charged a fortune per gram of weight attached, killing major construction. Apparently every little bit of weight meant the cable had to be carefully and expensively realigned.
It did have the effect of being the signifier for orbiting, getting to the iron ring was a mark of success for Earthlings like me. It meant you got enough money to afford to leave the planet.
Sitting down on the sofa once more I glanced at the vid screen and pinged it on from my interface. The normal news channel flicked on and showed some parade in one of the rich districts celebrating the founding of Klenn Investments, one of the first major corporations of Auranyx that was still around. They were mostly owned by Kitsuban Corporation now apart from some of their subsidiaries to do with Luna investments according to the newscaster, whatever that meant.
“Here you are, pancake rolls. You need to eat to grow up big and strong.” Mom said as she walked over and placed the little plate of pancake things on the table.
“Thanks mom.” I said, leaning forward to grab one. I burned myself on it a little and flinched away but the pain switched to passive mode quickly. Sanctum even helping me eat my breakfast apparently.
I tucked into the pancakes with a bit of blowing and enjoyed them, they even had some syrup stuff in the middle of the curl which was quite sweet. A little too sweet but still good. Mom even sniped a quick bit for herself from one of the ones still on the plate.
“I had to check it wasn’t poisoned or something.” Mom said with a smile.
“A bit late mom, I was already eating them. You can have one if you want.”
“No, they’re yours. I’m happy knowing they are safe to eat.” She said, walking away to clean up the living room.
Woman were just gremlins really, they just liked to pretend not to be generally. Although trying to imagine Marchand acting like that just didn’t work in my head. Allie didn’t fit either. Maybe woman went through a big overhaul when they got old? Like a firmware upgrade to remove all the gremlin and add in extra scariness. Noe might actually have enough scariness already, she’d likely just keep her gremliness instead.
I needed to get on with the reading and programming so I finished breakfast and leaned back. I put the vid screen on mute and brought up the books and documents that Marchand had given me. I’d already read through them here and there and covered the topics that had come up that I needed to know about like connecting, nodes and some of the programming stuff for daemons and other programs.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Now I needed to really drill into the material until I understood it properly, I needed to be able to make more advanced programs for both attack and defense. Some things for utility like moving through node spaces quickly if they were fixed in size and too large to move through quickly along with something to hide my presence at a node to anyone tracking me through a grid.
Checking through the documents I found lots of explanations of typical practices among cybersecurity at different levels of investment along with things to watch out for that might cause a grid to stand out as more secure than expected. The most obvious being patches of fixed space that didn’t contain anything that were likely looking for a specific tag attached to you that would trigger a secure node connection or even a full on node transformation that would unload the node you were on from under you and load a new node.
Looking through the documents really ate into the time as nearly two hours had passed by the time I was finished taking notes and making little script snippets that would be useful to form into actual scripts later. I did a sweep through the stuff one last time and then put the files away and left my notes on the side of my interface.
Next I opened my programming interface and started putting in a bunch of different script opening setups that would be good to be compatible with different grid restrictions and different program types to add to in the actual scripts I’d use the opening for. It wouldn’t work for everything, but it’d work for a lot of stuff.
With that done I started making a general weapon type program, something that would really break down hostile programs, daemons and users. It would need a lot of really basic runtime stuff that every type of program would need and would need to hit all the different ways programs would exist on the node. Lots of ways to make the target hard to hit by making the way it instantiated or moved very abstracted so basic attack programs wouldn’t touch it because they weren’t acting on the right vector to hit the target.
I sat there for a while putting in the code to call on the right functions and then a load of qualifiers to make sure the variables were called properly even if they were obscured by abstraction or nested data structures or other stuff that would get in the way. With that done the basic targeting was managed properly, it wasn’t a work of cutting edge design or anything but it was generic enough to hit a lot of different thing reliably.
Next was the actual effect on what it hit, it would need to have a strong effect on the target but outright shutting down a program like that was difficult. There were a lot of ways even very simple programs could prevent their data from being deleted, there were also ways to prevent the program from being directly shut down. The easiest way to make a program just stop running was to slow it’s runtime reaction speed enough that the node would either just reboot it or at least attempt to shut it down as it was taking up node bandwidth but obviously not responding correctly, most grids didn’t like crashed programs slowing everything down.
One effect that would hit every kind of target was a forced update action, any time something was influenced by something else on a grid it got a update action and the grid had to handle that. If I forced the target to update as long as my weapon was touching it then it would essentially spam the grid with updates and most grids would forcibly shut down the program doing that because it ground everything to a halt. At the same time such big and obvious attacks were usually traced to their source, so it would be a dangerous attack type.
Another effect to put in could be a code injection of some kind, make the program run something it shouldn’t and hope that whatever was injected lined up with whatever variables it had and caused it problems. It would cause a freeze usually as the code it ran didn’t fully line up and threw an error. Freezes were simple to resolve with most programs as they had counter measures against that, even if it stayed frozen though the grid would soon enough reboot the program anyway. The other thing that could happen is the injected code lined up totally with whatever variables were injected and cause the program a super weird function response. This could be a majorly glitched behavior or even something helpful like disabling parts of the program in such a way that the program didn’t realize anything was wrong.
The last wide method I had read about was to strike at the connection to the grid directly, make it so that each impact from the weapon would randomize the target’s interior address which would make it basically stall while it reconnected to the grid through it’s new address. This method had a lot of protection against it, most programs had security against modifying variables to prevent these kinds of things never mind users. If I could make something that avoided those protection from coming in from a different angle of attack it could be very useful and very wide reaching though.
I had the thought of making a weapon that attacked the target by immediately trying to scramble as much data as it could to mask the actual attack. Scrambling data was basically impossible for a user to do without bypassing the programs security, but it would take up the program’s runtime to deny all the requests. In that gap the weapon would quickly make a request to the node to swap two variables, the weapons position and the targets. When the target refused to move due to an outside request automatically the weapon would then teleport into the target’s position as the node system would simply complete the accepted requests, my weapon naturally accepting the move. With my weapon now having the same address of the target for a single moment of runtime it would request the node to force all addresses at it’s location to randomize as a security request.
Security requests were considered higher priority during runtime calculations and would trigger before movement calculations. The node would then forcibly render my weapon and the target into a stalled state as they attempted to reconnect to the node except I would just make it so the weapon reappeared in my hand and used my connection to reestablish it’s connection, using an existing connection was always faster as it bypassed typical security checks.
I would then have a weapon that could force a target program, daemon or user to stall on impact. My weapon would phase from my hand into the target and back into my hand before a single frame of runtime had passed but the target would be stalled and forced to reconnect. I could then just keep hitting them until the errors built up enough for them to either crash or the node to shut down the program or daemon or boot out the user.
It was a way of changing data in my target without having access to it’s data by making the node do the work. It wouldn’t work on super secure strict grids that had restrictions on functions users could even call from the node systems, but it would work on a lot of grids. That was enough for now.
Plugging away at the program I put in some basic coordinates for the avatar of the weapon at the end, I decided on making it a truncheon to match the one I had picked up from those operators in the bunker. Even if they were dead I’d remember them my way, not as sad victims of the city but as operators, as tools for other people to employ. Much the same as I was.